Discoveries of the day

You can go to 23andme.com and for 200 USD you can get your DNA analyzed. You get a report containing 966,977 SNPs. (You also get access to reports to explain what that means so it isn’t just a pile of data).

NPs are “single nucleotide polymorphisms”, single variations in DNA that affect how various proteins code. Scientists only know what approximately 14,515 of them do. There’s somewhere between 10 and 30 million possible SNPs in the genome (depending on which unreferenced wiki page you believe).

Assuming 30 million SNPs, and assuming SNPs are the only allowed form of genetic variation in a “human” (which is actually not at all true, but bear with me…) there are approximately 10^(10^8.324868269729194) theoretical humans that can be created. This is a number so large it can’t be written down in conventional mathematical notation, and is vastly larger than the number of atoms in the universe.